Thursday, December 20th, 2012
From January 27-31 in Madeira Park, BC, join Plan Institute and Social Innovation Generation (SiG) for Thinking Like a Movement—an annual four-day learning opportunity with Canada’s leading experts in social innovation.
To learn more about the event—designed for social innovators in business, government, and the citizen sector who want to extend the impact, durability, and scale of their work—click here.
Saturday, December 15th, 2012
The Foundation has created, in partnership with the National Arts Centre, a $60,000 fund to assist Canadian organizations that are launching Sistema music programs. El Sistema—founded in Venezuela in 1975—provides children in low income communities with access to musical instruments and a demanding regimen of instruction at no cost.
The fund is open to: programs currently in the pre-launch and fundraising stage; programs in operation for less than three years; and established programs that propose a research project with the potential to benefit Sistema-inspired programs nationally. Eligible organizations can access matching funds up to a maximum of $10,000 for a variety of purposes, including operations, evaluation, research, and administration.
To learn more about the eligibility criteria and submission process click here.
Saturday, December 1st, 2012
The Foundation congratulates the winners of the online Ashoka Changemakers competition, BC Ideas: Solutions for Stronger Communities. BC Ideas sought innovative solutions to complex health, social, and environmental challenges facing British Columbia communities.
Selected from 466 entries, 33 competition winners received grants of $500 to $20,000, including one from the Foundation awarded to Beauty Night, an organization building self esteem and changing the lives of women and girls living in poverty, through wellness training, life skills development, and makeovers.
Visit www.changemakers.com/BCideas to learn more.
Monday, November 26th, 2012
Foundation grantee, The Stop Community Food Centre (the Stop) was recently featured in the Canadian Business article The Stop: The capitalist’s guide to feeding the poor, describing the Stop’s journey from a traditional food bank model to an innovative community food centre.
The article highlights the Stop’s ever-growing array of programs and initiatives to engage and serve its clientele, including “community gardens that provide a therapeutic space where members are taught how to grow their own vegetables; programs that teach young mothers about proper nutrition; workshops where local residents learn about food security and receive public-speaking training; and after-school classes where tweens whip up healthy meals”.
The article also shares the Stop’s innovative approach to diversifying funding and revenue, highlighting some of the social enterprises launched by the Stop, including a successful catering business and farmer’s market, among others.
Building on the success of the Stop’s model, and with demand for similar models in other communities, Community Food Centres Canada was recently launched to share the community food centre model across the country.
Visit www.thestop.org to learn more.
Friday, November 23rd, 2012
ArtsSmarts—an initiative launched by the Foundation in 1998 that is now a stand-alone organization—held its sixth national Knowledge Exchange recently at the University of Calgary, on the theme of cultivating creative communities. One of the presenters at the meeting, John Eger, subsequently penned this piece in the Huffington Post: The Best Way to Grow the Economy? Creativity.
In other ArtsSmarts news, the program was one of six charities selected by Target Canada to receive a share of one million dollars through the Give with Target program.
Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
The Innoweave Impact and Strategic Clarity module focuses on an approach to strategic thinking that eludes many non-profit organizations. Rather than focusing on what we do (activities), a theory of change requires us to think about the ultimate goals we are trying to achieve (outcomes) and how, through our activities, we achieve those goals. Though it sounds simple, this is actually a fairly challenging exercise – so much so that Innoweave is putting 14 organizations through a 6-month process to develop their intended impact statements and theories of change. For organizations with a wide range of programs, a long history, or that operate on a system-level, defining a single intended impact for the organization is no easy task. But doing so can help organizations better understand what activities are most effective in achieving that impact, and therefore make more strategic decisions about where to focus their efforts in a resource-scarce environment.
Learn more about Innoweave’s Impact & Strategic Clarity module.
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
In a new Foundation webinar, Building on Failure: Learning When Things Go Wrong, Ashley Good of Admitting Failure provides an overview of how to “fail forward”—an approach that is grounded in years of generating failure reports with Engineers Without Borders Canada—and Dr. Natasha Blanchet-Cohen highlights some failures (and lessons learned) related to her work with the Foundation’s pan-Canadian youth engagement initiative, YouthScape.
Watch the pre-recorded webinar.
Monday, November 19th, 2012
On November 16 in Toronto, Innoweave held a workshop for the first cohort of the Impact and Strategic Clarity module. The module focuses on enabling community organizations to articulate a coherent ‘intended impact’ and ‘theory of change’ and report on it to internal and external stakeholders. It is being led by the Bridgespan Group, and supported by United Way Centraide Canada, PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada Foundation, United Way York Region, The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and CISCO Canada. 14 participating organizations will receive individualized coaching over the next several months as they refine their impact strategies. Additional cohorts of the Impact and Strategic Clarity module are planned in 2013.
To learn more about Innoweave, including upcoming workshops on social finance, developmental evaluation, social enterprise, and cloud computing, visit Innoweave’s recently launched beta website at www.innoweave.ca.
The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation 1002 Sherbrooke W., Suite 1800, Montreal, Québec H3A 3L6
©2013 McConnell Foundation. All rights reserved.
Site by Plank
We are committed to reducing our environmental footprint